Model skipAttributesOnUpdate fails

Hello everyone. Quick question. I am making an email activation of a user after registration and after a user goes to an email sent to him I want to update a column Active in database and set it to 1. However, on update the password gets validated once again because it has to be 8-16 chars, but when I grab user from db to update the password is hashed and is 60 chars in length. I have set the skipAttributesOnUpdate in my initializer of a model, but the password stil gets updated. So is it a bug or I am doing something wrong?
The model code :